Thursday, August 2, 2012

These are
exciting times for documentary filmmakers like myself. With technological
advances from newly affordable HD video cameras to avenues of dissemination
like YouTube revolutionizing the field, it’s never been easier to make a film
and get it out there. People all over the globe who had once been voiceless can
now be heard.

Some parts of this new world, however, are less great. Filmmakers now have to
accept that people will often watch our work on tiny screens––an iPad, a
laptop––while checking their email, the weather, and dealing with a million
other tiny distractions. The old world where a viewer sat in a movie theater
giving your film her rapt attention is no more.

Many filmmakers, myself included, find ourselves at a crossroads: we either
embrace this new viewing paradigm, or we make something that cannot be consumed
in such a fleeting manner. I’ve actually tried to do both.

Over the past few years I’ve begun making “live documentaries”––these are events
where I narrate a film in person and cue images from a laptop, while a live
band performs an original soundtrack as the film plays. (I have a new “live
documentary” touring this fall called The Love
Song of R. Buckminster Fuller, which I'm performing with the legendary
indie rock band Yo La Tengo.) I adore this
form of filmmaking because it’s a way to hang on to the live experience of
seeing movies, which I feel is a precious thing. It shouldn’t be lost. When you
see a movie in person you experience it with others. You share in some sort of
communal time and space, and then continue the experience through conversations
afterward. All of these connections around the film are often as important as
the film itself. So the "live documentary" format is a way for me to
fight the tide of isolation and home viewing, and try to bring people together
to experience my films.

That said, I am also very interested in utilizing the power of the Internet as
a distribution system for a diverse and disparate viewership. I recently made a
documentary about Esperanto called The
Universal Language and decided that there would be no better project to
experiment with online distribution than this one.

Esperanto is an artificial language invented by a Polish eye doctor named
Ludwig Zamenhof in the late 1800s. Zamenhof believed that if everyone in the
world spoke a common, neutral language people could overcome war and racism.
Although Zamenhof’s dream might seem naive to us today, during the 1920s and
30s there was a huge Esperanto movement worldwide.

Today, surprisingly, a vibrant Esperanto movement still exists. Estimates range
from 50,000 to 2 million present-day speakers of the language, and every summer
there is a world Esperanto congress in a different city. I attended a couple of
these and was surprised to find 2,000 to 3,000 Esperanto speakers each time,
traveling from all over the world.

Because Esperantists (as they are called) are such a scattered, global
community, how could I effectively reach out to broad swathe of them? The
Internet! Right now, for the first time ever, filmmakers can distribute
our own work online solo––no iTunes, no distribution company, no one else
needed. Last year, my Bulgarian friend Stoyan Dabov set up a great
website for the film (in both English
and Esperanto) where
people can download a file and watch the film instantly on their own TV or
computers.

It can’t be overstated how radical this new technology is for filmmakers. In
the past a filmmaker was dependent on a distributor or studio in order to get a
movie out into the world. They were the ones who had the networks and
relationships to put a videotape or DVD on store shelves and ultimately into
the hands of a viewer. Filmmakers occasionally did this on their own, but it
was an epic and uphill struggle.

It’s only been in the past year or two that the technology has evolved to the
point where a person can download an entire film relatively quickly (movie
files are generally huge files!). With The Universal Language, we're able to do
this through a company called Topspin, which actually takes care of the
downloading and billing, but the person who is purchasing the film never leaves
our site. Again, this is revolutionary; it's the first time ever that a
filmmaker can get a film out into the world this independently, and it is an
exciting moment!

It’s been interesting to see how this kind of thing can work. Over the past
months, I’ve been surprised by the steady stream of people downloading The
Universal Language from our site. Every day there are people all over the world
watching the film and hopefully thinking about Esperanto, the concept and role
of language, and other issues the film raises, which is so neat.

On the other hand, it’s been clear that the notion that one can just put
something out on the Internet and people will flock to it, or that it'll “go
viral,” is plainly naive. With the deafening roar of so many books and movies
and albums and causes all vying for attention online, we really had to promote
and market the film like crazy in order to get people to notice. But this has
been a good challenge. It's spurred us to create a blog on our site where we've
posted interviews and short articles for Esperantists and non-Esperantists
alike, for which we've been continuing to research new and
interesting Esperanto-related leads. (A recent example: an interview with
one of the many Esperanto-speaking members of the Pirate political party in
Germany.)

So this whole thing has been a real learning experience. Yes, technology is making
us all more scattered and frazzled and isolated, but it's also providing us
with first-time-ever opportunities to reach out and make contact with each
other. The other day some Esperantists in the Congo got in touch to let us know
about a screening of The Universal Language they had recently. I was struck by
the fact that although we might not have reached the world of peace and
internationalism the Ludwig Zamenhof imagined when he created Esperanto, in
some small ways technology is helping us to lurch in that direction.

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